Book: Show us one of your favorite cookbooks.

River Cottage Meat Book

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

With Bokker responsible for the baked goods (and other dishes of course) and me being a dedicated carnivore my favourite recipe book is Meat. Which is not only full of great recipies but also a large section devoted to eating meat ethically and understanding cuts and quality in our modern supermarket, factory farmed world.

Hugh's advice is if you don't get your meat from a butcher who can tell you the meats origins it isn't worth eating! Something I definitely agree with and am priviliged enough to live somewhere where I have access to excellent locally produce in local shops.

Some of the recipes I reserve for when Bokker is away as most offal is not particularly to her tastes.

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Having a wisdom tooth removed hurts................a lot.

It is five days since I had the surgery on my impacted wisdom tooth, leaving a big hole in my mouth and it is still incredibly painful. The swelling has gone down a lot but it has been replaced with a lovely big yellow bruise which makes me look like I have jaundice.

Bokker and I are going to be a bundle of laughs this evening!

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Show us some art in your home.

Barcode

This is one of my prized possesions, I remember when I first saw it getting on for 10 years ago and thought: wow, what a fantastic image.
I don't know what I liked so much about it and I wasn't sure exactly what social comment was being made but it stoked my interest in street art and meant that on my trips to London and other cities I was on the lookout for more.
When I saw this on the internet some time ago I had to have it and it now has pride of place in our LonNY inspired living room, where it will remain despite the current frenzy for selling these prints with a siginificant profit on ebay.

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Apparently it was valentines day yesterday and according to Bokker I could have posted for the Vox hunt "Show us love." And for Qotd I could have posted "Who or What do I really love?" Obviously I didn't post about either of these things and posted about a video of cars in Paris, or Top Gear!!!! as Bokker put it in a most outraged tone.

NB for both the Vox Hunt and Qotd yesterday of course I would have posted about Bokker, but she knows that so I didn't. And i don't see me appearing on her blog in answer to those questions.............;-)

Although if Bok had watched the below video all the way through she would have seen it's conclusion is a most romantic meeting of the car driver and his lady on the steps of the Sacre Couer at dawn.........awwww, how romantic.

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Some time ago on Top Gear they showed a short clip of the most amazing footage of a car driving through Paris early in the morning very, very fast. I was very impressed by the clip and when they gave details of the footage and what it was I carefully commited it to memory and then promptly forgot it.

Then recently I was in fopp and was flicking through their DVD's and there was a flickr of recognition as my eyes alighted on a particular DVD in the rack, the title was vaguely familiar C'tait un Rendezvous. When I picked it up and read the back it turned out it was indeed the film they had shown on Top Gear.

If you are at all into cars and films which include car chases this is well worth a viewing and when you are watching it remember that none of the streets were closed when it was filmed and it is all showing at actual speed, whoever is driving the car is really driving that fast.

C'etait Un Rendezvous (Claude Lelouch)

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What is your favorite kind of bagel and what do you put on it? 
Submitted by Nacwolin.

My favourite kind of beigel is plain made to a traditional jewish recipe, topped with hot salt beef and lots of mustard. Yum!!
They are especially good from this 24hr beigel shop in Brick Lane in London.

sunday beigels

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Well as I appear to be on a roll, getting back into the posting let me introduce you to Shlomo.

He is beatboxer extraordinaire from Leeds, the things he can do with his voice and throat are amazing he has real control over his vocal chords but the thing that really holds it all together is his rhythm. He can hold time perfectly allowing him to perform highly accurate interpretations of well known songs by artists such as The White Stripes, Salt and Pepa, Justin Timberlake and many more.

Check out this performance on the Jools Holland show.

Shlomo

I recently saw him perform live in Manchester at the Warehouse Project and was most impressed to see he had devloped a new aspect of his live performance using a sampler. This means that he can now produce his own tunes live on stage all built up just from his own voice. Watching hime do this live is amazing but this video does demonstrate the way he does it.

Shlomo live at BAC London

NB - everything in the video is Shlomos voice (except of course the big drum kit :-) )

So with his new skills I hope it isn't long until we hear an album from him, I would definitely buy it. He does already feature on one album already Bjork's most recent.

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Video: Show us a great music video.

daft punk - da funk

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Show us a photo of someone else taking a photo.
Submitted by ydnar.

snappers

Fellow Manchester flickrers on one of our previous meet ups.

See the rest of the set from this meet here.

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Show us some holiday decorations.

Christmas Tree

Having been a scrooge at work for the last week or so while other people have been putting up decorations and listening to christmas music, today I decided to relent and used this picture for my desktop.

I now also have tinsel on top of my monitor, much to my distaste but the people I work with made me do it ;-)

I did enjoy some of Bokker's mince pies about two weeks ago though and I am looking forward to her making more. We also put up our tree at the weekend and have visited the christmas market on a couple of occasions and finished all our present shopping.

So perhaps I am not too much of a scrooge!

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